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On the eve of the eve of the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen and in the wake of the hacked climate researchers' emails, former Scientific American Editor in Chief John Rennie discusses his ScientificAmerican.com article "7 Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense"
Podcast Transcription
Steve: Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, posted on December 3rd, 2009. I'm Steve Mirsky. Our old friend, John Rennie, has published an article on our Web site entitled "7 Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense," the subject of which is evidence for human interference with Earth's climate continues to accumulate. Couldn't be more timely in the [wake] of recent events and in the days before the United Nations's Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen. I visited John at his apartment in Manhattan.
Steve: Let's spend a minute because people haven't heard you on this podcast for awhile. So, who are you again?
Rennie: I'm John Rennie, currently a contributing editor to Scientific American. I was the editor in chief of Scientific American for oh—15 years or so.
Steve: I remember! And...
Rennie: ...I was your boss, too!
Steve: Yeah, that's right. And you are also teaching now at N.Y.U.
Rennie: That's right. Yes, in the science writing program there in their Graduate School of Journalism.
Steve: John, we are going to talk about one of the biggest controversies in science right now. And of course I'm referring to the question of whether research into the ribosome is worthy of a Nobel Prize in chemistry, as opposed to medicine or physiology.
Rennie: Well, Steve let's bear in mind that it's all chemistry down at that level.
Steve: Well, that's what Thomas Steitz, the Nobel laureate says.
Rennie: Yes! Right.
Steve: I threw a little "red herring" at you there!
Rennie: Well, you have shown me—you scamp!
Steve: We all know what we are really here to talk about and that is your article on the Scientific American Web site entitled, "7 Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense".
Rennie: Yes.
Steve: Propitious timing on your part, what with the hacked climate e-mails having been released after you started working on this?
Rennie: Right, actually just days, really almost at the same time I was filing this piece, that announcement came out—that a climate unit in the U.K. that had been hacked or whatever and in whatever ways it led to the e-mails and other files, being removed and then people trying to place that information onto like the real climate data work site in other locations, right.
Steve: And that is included in your article. You obviously worked hard to get that information into the article before publication. I just would like to point out, we're working a little backwards here, but I have been following some of the comments to this piece. There are hundreds; many of them were very angry and there was one that I saw that said, something about, you know, "Why don't you talk about the hacked e-mails?" So people are commenting without even bothering to read it anymore.
Rennie: Well, that seems to unfortunately be really characteristic of a lot of the kinds of arguments that are often used to, sort of, try to demonstrate why it is that all the science pointing toward anthropogenic climate change—global warming that we're experiencing right now—is caused by human activities, most particularly the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. A lot of the people who make those arguments, they are parading certain lines without really knowing what the evidence is on those and that's what we really did, in wanting to write this piece up, was to address at least some of those kinds of arguments and try to make the point that here is why, in fact, we do know some of these things; why those arguments used by these kinds of climate contrarians, why they don't hold up.
Steve: Why don't we go through the seven points? We'll talk about each one briefly and obviously anybody who is interested in more information, the complete article is available for free on the Scientific American Web site. So point number one, again these are "7 answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense"—we should say that the title is sort of a homage to your previous best seller.
Rennie: Yes, my "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" piece from a few years ago.
Steve: Which is still one of the most popular articles on the Web site.
Rennie: Well!
Steve: This is so much nonsense to deal with all the time.
Rennie: That's what is very sad.
Steve: So, claim number 1: Anthropogenic carbon dioxide can't be changing the climate because carbon dioxide is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in carbon dioxide are irrelevant.
Rennie: Right. So there are several different levels of error or misunderstanding of that are bound up just in that set of arguments. First of all, as we pointed out, there is no question that carbon dioxide is really only a trace gas in the atmosphere. It makes up, I think, like maybe, you know, 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. So it is present in very, very small quantities, but that doesn't really mean anything. [It] doesn't take a lot of alcohol in your bloodstream to make you drunk. It doesn't take a lot of arsenic in your bloodstream to make you dead. So, really the question is what is it doing in there? And that's where it becomes much more significant. The idea that is said a lot, that human beings just don't make that much CO2, don't release that much CO2 into the atmosphere, relative to other natural sources, it is itself kind of only half true. That is if you look at the total amount of carbon dioxide that's there in the atmosphere at any one time, it's true, most of that is coming from natural sources, but that means it's coming from things like organic decay and other processes that are going on all the time, and that are routinely offset by other processes in nature that are pulling the carbon dioxide back out of the environment. What we are talking about here though is that the net increase in CO2 that's been going on now for the past, you know, 150 years and more, that is largely driven by human beings and, in fact, human beings produce vastly more carbon dioxide than the volcanoes. So the U.S. geological survey points out that it's like a 130 times as much as volcanoes. Now the argument about water vapor is itself not quite correct. It is true that water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but it's not the case that everybody arguing for anthropogenic climate change is saying that water vapor doesn't matter or that they're ignoring that. It's quite the opposite. The water vapor is part of the model. You know, not to bog it down too much, but the idea is that the temperature increase associated with the greenhouse effect of the carbon dioxide tends to—that drives up the temperature, which increases the amount of water that's coming up into the atmosphere because the atmosphere will tend to go toward a fairly, for the most part, a fairly stable level of relative humidity. And that then manages to double what would be the warming effect of the CO2 itself. So, the water vapor is part of the mechanism of CO2-driven global warming.
Steve: So, alright. Here is claim number 2: The alleged hockey stick graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved. It doesn't even acknowledge the existence of a medieval warm period around 1000 A.D. that was hotter than today is. Therefore, global warming is a myth.
Rennie: Okay. Well again there are several different things that are wrong with this set of arguments. One of them is that people who think it is, sort of like, one hockey stick graph are mistaken. In fact, there are dozens of different reconstructions of the climate over the past couple of thousand years that have been used and they pretty much all show something like this: kind of relatively stable temperatures, some up and down over the past couple of thousand years, but then in the past couple of hundred years, a very decided sharp uptick. It does look like there may indeed have been some sort of "medieval warming period" back between say like 900 A.D. and 1300 A.D., but what's never really been clear is whether or not that's just a local phenomenon or whether it's a global phenomenon. If it's a local phenomenon, one that just happened, say, in Europe, then it doesn't really mean much in the context of global warming arguments. And, in fact, a very recent paper that just came out tends to further indicate that, in fact, it was more of a local phenomenon that was driven by identifiable natural factors like variations in solar output. But the more important point with all of this really is, suppose that the hockey stick graphs really were invalid; suppose that they were busted, as some of these kinds of contrarians like to say. It doesn't matter. The original argument about the need for us to watch out for greenhouse-driven global warming emerged long before those hockey stick graphs ever were put together. They came out of contemporary modern studies of recent increases in global temperatures and the concern that pumping all of the CO2 in the atmosphere has to be driving these greenhouse effects. So even if the hockey stick is wrong, you then still have to explain why this is going on, and it doesn't seem as though you can attribute that to, say like, variations in the sun or some other kinds of natural factors.
Steve: It's similar to the argument that even if we didn't have any fossils, you could still prove that evolution happened by genetic, you know, comparative genomics.
Rennie: Yeah, that's right. It seems like then in that level, sort of, evolution is a natural consequence of a, kind of, a system of reproduction that's based on genes with [a] capability of mutation in which you're going to get anything like some kind of natural selection going on.
Steve: Back to the other thing, the global warming then.
Rennie: Yes.
Steve: So claim number 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; the Earth has actually been cooling since then. George Will has been making this comment.
Rennie: Right and George Will is just completely wrong about all of this. This is a very selective use of data; 1998 was the warmest year on record, but—and it does seem like you look at some declining temperatures since then—but remember that's a very small decrease over a very large increase. You know, there's no question—statistically, when you look at the level of variations that you would expect to find and that have been actually seen in the past and the rest of that trend, that doesn't mean that things have suddenly changed. I mean, basically you need a much more pronounced downward shift to certainly indicate that global warming has suddenly stopped and that just doesn't seem to be true. It's sort of like, you know, George Will is a big fan of baseball. It's sort of like, if you had someone who's got a great lifetime batting average and he is suddenly in a slump, well you don't suddenly say, well his career is over. He may be in a slump, maybe his career is over, but maybe it's just evening out a little bit; he is going to come back and hit at his old average again and. in fact, there's plenty of reason to think that we will see some level of, you know, further increase. Now it's also possible that, you know, we may—in fact, there are some scientists who have no doubt whatsoever about the overall phenomenon of current global warming, but who are making the argument that because of certain other things in the dynamics of how climate works, we might actually be in for a period of, you know, 10 years or more where you are not going to see a very pronounced increase in these kind of surface temperatures. So that, you know, is the kind of thing that would naturally fuel this kind of skepticism, contrarianism, and is, in fact, exactly one of the things that Senator James Inhofe pointed to recently when he was crowing about the fact that obviously global warming had ended. But it's just not true, and in fact when—there's a great service that was done by the Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein, in that he took the climate data, the temperature data, didn't label it for it was, and gave it to statisticians and asked them if there were any trends that were showing up in that; and they all concurred that there was no clear indication of a statistically significant decrease or leveling off of the overall increase. We're basically looking at a, sort of, statistical fluctuation.
Steve: So does Inhofe think that the global warming has stopped or that it was the big hoax in the first place—it never happened?
Rennie: Well, this is the great thing, I mean, this is sort of the larger point of what I think is so frustrating for a lot of people in trying to explain the issues of global warming and in having to try to deal with these kinds of things; of why it is, quite frankly, I wanted to refer to this as a, sort of, climate contrarian nonsense. [It's] that a lot of these people, they're not really skeptics, in a sense that they want to sort of dispassionately look at this and they will be led to whatever conclusions that are most strongly indicated by the data. They really already committed themselves to a position. In effect, they don't want to do something in a big way to combat global warming, and so they will use any number of these different sorts of forms of denial. That is, they can start off by saying that there is no global warming; that global warming if it's happening is purely natural, it can't be driven by human beings. If it's driven by human beings, it probably won't actually be harmful; it might actually be beneficial. And then that usually goes to [the] point that, well even if it were harmful, that there's really probably nothing we could do about it, we would be better off just sort of adapting to it. And so you see the senator and a lot of other people who are similarly just fundamentally opposed to acknowledging global warming at a policy level. They will grab onto any of these sorts of arguments. They are not committed to a particular position that's, say, global warming is real, but that maybe it's not as bad as people think.
Steve: Let's move onto claim number 4: The sun or cosmic rays are much more likely to be the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too.
Rennie: Right. So, it's perfectly reasonable, if you're looking at a phenomenon of global warming, to ask, "So are there big natural forces that could be responsible for this?" And the obvious place to start with this is the sun, because probably changes in solar intensity or variations in the Earth's own orbit that would affect the amount of sunlight falling on the Earth are certainly a big part of what have driven ice ages and other big climate changes in the past before human civilization came along. The problem is that, when you actually look at the record on this, it's not really very clear that there is enough going on in the sun over the past couple of hundred years to account for the kind of warming that we're seeing. So it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis and it's been looked at, and it just doesn't seem to hold up very well. It may well be that some of the warming that we saw, maybe some of a, particularly, say, what we saw in the first half of the 20th century, a lot of that might actually have been more attributable to the sun then to the level of carbon dioxide. But most of the temperature increase that we've been seeing has been in the last half of the 20th century, and there's no way you can attribute that to what's going on with the sun. This argument that maybe its cosmic rays is a relatively new idea, and again it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis because cosmic rays can be involved in helping to generate clouds that would then have the effect of helping to cool off the Earth. And in effect over the past half century or so, the sun, although its luminosity hasn't changed very much, it has been very magnetically active and that would have the effect of decreasing the amount of cosmic rays, which would have the effect then of, if this is an active phenomenon, decreasing the amount of clouds and increasing the amount of sunlight that's warming up the Earth. But so far it just doesn't seem to be a very compelling case for that. You're not seeing the kinds of trends in the actual measured increase in cosmic rays that would have to been taking place. You aren't also seeing some of the phenomena of the patterns of warming that are going on; it doesn't seem to correspond to what could have, which we would expect by associating it with the cosmic rays. So it's again a perfectly reasonable hypothesis and one that will continue to be looked at, but at the moment it's very hard to be able to say why that would be a more compelling case than the one for the greenhouse gases of all the increase in carbon dioxide. Because we have 35 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere than we did back early in the 19th century—that's a huge increase, it's got to be having a greenhouse effect unless you can figure out some way [to explain] why it wouldn't be and that just doesn't seem to be clearly the case.
Steve: And the Mars issue—because Mars is warmer also?
Rennie: Right. Well, you know, what's very funny is that people who are not persuaded by, you know, by all kinds of different measurements that the Earth is actually warming up, somehow can seize on a much smaller data set associated with Mars and be convinced. "Oh look! Global warming is going on there." The evidence of Mars [warming] is frankly a lot spottier. You're dealing with a much smaller data set and it may be that some of the warming that you're looking at there is actually the effect of some big dust storms that were going across the Martian surface that changed the reflectance off the planet's surface and that therefore had the effect of affecting the surface temperatures there. It's just, you know, it's possible for other planets to be warming up for completely different reasons.
Steve: Well, let's not forget Mars has an anorexic little atmosphere.
Rennie: Yeah, that's right. I mean, the other thing is that some of these people pointed the idea that, well, Pluto has also been warming up. Well, Pluto, you know, there again, even spottier indications that Pluto is warming up. Bear in mind some of the reasons why Pluto was warming up was, what was happening, well it was moving away from the sun and getting less solar radiance that way. So quite frankly, the sun is not driving that solar warming either.
Steve: We are talking about the former planet, Pluto.
Rennie: Yes, that's right.
Steve: Just wanted to make sure we weren't [infringing]...
Rennie: Not the Disney dog.
Steve: Exactly, I don't want to get in trouble with the Disney people.
Rennie: Right.
Steve: All right. Claim number 5: Climatologists conspire—you know, we are really going to get into it now—to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data. Their so-called consensus on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn't settled by popularity.
Rennie: Okay. So this one is particularly timely in the [light] of the leak of these ...
Steve: Not a leak....
Rennie: The theft! Is that what you're going for?
Steve: There you go.
Rennie: Right.
Steve: [They were] stolen; the e-mails were stolen.
Rennie: Well, in any—however one describes it, this is certainly what it is being much debated at the moment because people are looking at some of those , the emails and the language [that's] used, and they are pointing to various indications of, "Gee, did some of the other scientists there associated with this climate research group, were some of them involved in things that would have involved tampering with the data or trying to hide—if so unlawfully—some kinds of request for information and so forth?" And look all of that deserves to be investigated where there is wrong doing on that, it absolutely deserves to be criticized in the harshest possible terms. But quite frankly again, it's not like the case for global warming all hinges off of things that are coming out of that one research unit. You're looking at stuff that's happening all over the world. Now also, you know, bear in mind that the indications that, you know, CO2 has an effect on the climate because of its greenhouse effect, that involves [a] huge number of different papers and scientists going all the way back to, you know, John Tyndall in the early 19th century.
Steve: Our first global warming article in Scientific American related to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was...
Rennie: I think, it was July 1959?
Steve: Correct. Over 50 years ago. We've been tracking this for that long.
Rennie: Right, people have been worried about this for a very long time.
Steve: Svante Arrhenius, the first Nobel Laureate in chemistry...
Rennie: Right.
Steve: ...he was worried about this over 100 years ago.
Rennie: Right. He calculated that the increase in CO2 would be, you know, would cause this kind of increase in global warming. So, you know, this is not a new idea that 's , you know, the environmentalists have just dreamt up in the past few decades. You know, I may be making, sort of, fun of the idea of this being, the sort of, the kind of [DaVinci Code-Dan-Brown-like giant Freemasons conspiracy,] and you know, obviously it would be impossible for it to be something like that. A more reasonable argument is that,
"Well okay it's not that kind of conspiracy, but you've got huge numbers of scientists who all have a, you know, their own vested interests in trying to push an agenda like this because it brings them more money or something like that." It's like, you know, at some level, maybe? You know, you certainly have to watch out for it, I think, you know, scientists are as humans as anybody else, so I mean, I think it would be hard to imagine that you could point to any group of scientists and not find some level of malfeasance in there someplace, as in any number of other professions. But the fact is that, you know, you don't want to make this about the people. It's about the work itself, and this is where it comes down the question of the consensus. Yes, science isn't settled on a popularity contest, but this isn't about whether or not even the scientists necessarily all agree about this; it's the fact that you've got a gigantic amount of scientific [information], a huge number of papers and databases that all point toward the realities of CO2-driven global warming. And that's what you know, that's the consensus that has to be defeated, not any sort of petitions or reports coming from IPCC or anything else. Those represent that information and the kinds of findings that you find in that, but you know, quite frankly people who think that there is like one amazing silver bullet of a climate contrarian kind of paper that's going to come out, that you're going to disprove the hockey stick graph and suddenly the whole case for global warming falls apart—that's crazy.
Steve: Which relates to claim number 6 (you touched on it a little bit actually): Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige.
Rennie: Right, you know, I mean, if you look at the amount of funding that's gone on over, sort of, the recent era of global climate concern, quite frankly the amount of money going to the researchers, at least in terms of the U.S. budgets has not increased all that much. Once you adjust for inflation and like it, it basically comes out as only little bit higher, it's almost have been flat. So, they're quite frankly not getting that much money. There are frankly a lot of other people involved in industry who are getting a lot more money coming out of this, which is ironic because the industry as a group which has probably been, you know, more responsible for trying to resist a lot of the efforts that would be involved in responding to global warming. You know, it's just hard to imagine that they would be that well motivated by this. Quite frankly at a career level, [a] climatologist would be able to make his reputation much faster by being able to stand up and able to clearly show why it was that all the concerns about global warming are dead wrong than by being part of the much larger pack of climatologists who are all in agreement that it's going on.
Steve: I'm reminded of the Haldane quote about, you know, "What would prove to you,"—[and] he was talking about evolution— [he] was asked "What would prove to you that evolution, as we understand it, is either all wrong or didn't happen at all?" And he famously replied, "A fossil rabbit in the pre-Cambrian." So what would prove to you, John Rennie, that it's all been wrong and it's a hoax?
Rennie: Sure. Because listen, I'm not somebody who started off absolutely convinced of the reality of global warming. I mean, I think, I was very skeptical about sort of some of the concerns when they first came out too. The evidence accumulated, and I've been driven to my current view of the whole situation. But absolutely. Look it wouldn't be just one thing, but there are several things that together would have a very effective way of being able to certainly shake all of my confidence on this. If it was very clear that, first of all, that you could get a very clear set of data measurements or temperature measurements, currently and maybe going back, even just over the past century or so, that clearly indicated that you were not, in fact, getting a real global warming that has been going on; that there's some sort of systemic error in all of those measurements or a number of systemic errors that just show that there hadn't been global warming, that would clearly be one thing that would [dis]prove it right there.
Steve: The elucidation of a mechanism by which the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not raise temperature.
Rennie: That's right and clear indications that that mechanism seemed like it was going on; absolutely, that's the kind of thing that would clearly help to offset that major part of that part of the argument. I mean, those are things that could be out there that could be driven. But you can't just make sort of general hand waving arguments that say things like, "All climate models are nonsense; we can't trust them." Climate models summarize everything that we think we understand about what goes into climate at the moment. We do understand a number of things that go into climate at the moment. We don't know everything, but the climate models represent a summary of that, in which you try to quantitatively put it together. Now it may be wrong, but you can't just dismiss all of that information and then say, "Well, we just don't, you know, there are a lot of other factors we don't know about."—unless you can start to point to why it is that they all have to be going the other way. You know, this is the thing about the uncertainty of a climate [science]—uncertainty cuts both ways. Maybe we're all wrong about this, about what's going on, maybe the concerns about global warming are greatly overstated. But by that same token, maybe we are vastly understating them, may be we're actually staring at way worse global warming that's coming up. This is not a reason to just sort of bury our head in the sands and ignore that.
Steve: And it raises the question of what evidence, if any, would convince a climate contrarian that anthropogenic global warming was real. And if there's nothing that could change your mind, well you know, then it's not worth having this conversation in the first place.
Rennie: Right.
Steve: Let's move onto point number 7. Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don't produce carbon dioxide or geoengineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint.
Rennie: Right. Okay, so here we're getting into the issue of more policy and less one of the actual science. And therefore, you know, in the area of policy, look, now the answers [of] what make the best recommendations are less clear-cut, because it's sort of questionable, you know, what are the costs and what kind of risks do you want to associate with all of this. The problem with some of the people first of all, who sometimes say, well, you know, rather than just trying to regulate CO2 better and try to address climate change that way, we should really just be putting all of our money into developing better technologies. They say that like these are two completely contrary, different approaches. The whole point of imposing regulations that would tend to restrict CO2 is to create incentives for people to then develop more technologies. I mean, I don't think anybody is opposed to funding more technological development or encouraging more technological development in the private sector that would help to address things that way. But when—just sort of cavalierly assuming that technology will somehow manage to solve all of [these] problems on its own seems really, really reckless, because it were, quite frankly we've been noticing the problems of global warming for a while now anyway, and where are the great solutions? Even if you developed a great solution technologically, it takes time to deploy it, and all the time that you have all the sort of, extra CO2 in the atmosphere, tending to boost the global warming that's going on. All the time that's going on you are worsening the problem; you are increasing whatever it is that your great technological fix down line is going to have to deal with. [And] you're going to be incurring a certain number of irreparable losses along the way to the environment. Now maybe it is worth [it to] you to do that; maybe you don't care what happens; maybe, you know, [that's] the political policy consensus that you want to arrive to. You don't care if the sea level increases, you don't care if the growth patterns for different areas of agriculture all change. Okay, fine. If you're willing to bear the costs of that, that's fine, but a lot of the analyses suggest that that's a bad bargain for us. And you know, when you're looking to something like the, kind of, the big geo-engineering fixes that are sometimes proposed, you know, the idea of, well, let's, instead of just continuing to mess with the environment accidentally, the way we have been, let's go out there and do it deliberately; let's, you know, really do this in a big, focused way and let's try to, you know, clean up our own mess that way. Again, it's not like it's fundamentally an unreasonable thing of thinking to do and maybe in principal it's even, you know, on paper, it might be a more affordable way of dealing with this. But it's also very, very risky. You know, if you are doing things, some of the kind of geoengineering approaches that would be involved in—for example, you know, people have discussed everything from like, you know, putting giant reflectors into space to try to reduce the amount of sunlight falling on the Earth; that's one, you know, kind of obviously literally pie in the sky approach to be able to do something like that. If you do that, if you're not offsetting that CO2 that's going on, it's still building up. So, you know, at that point, you own the climate, and if your system ever breaks down, you are going to see that rebound warming happening very, very fast after that. There are also a lot of consequences associated with these kinds of things. If you want to pump more kinds of sulfur compounds into the air in the interest of creating more clouds, to reflect away the sunlight, that's probably very doable, but there's probably a very good risk associated with that of, like, more acid rain and a lot of other problems that would come from that. You know, if you are not reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, there are going to be big consequences: the acidification of the oceans, different other kinds of effects on plant life and so forth. So, you know, it seems like, you know, listen, we get into a desperate last [ditch] situation, maybe we have to do those things. And so I think it would certainly be worth continuing to investigate those; about, you know, how they might work and what the pros and cons of them might be. That's only reasonable to be looking at a lot of that stuff, given the magnitude of what some of these problems might be. But that's not an argument for ignoring what we might be able to achieve in a regulatory fashion now.
Steve: I bring up the idea of population control as a global warming break, but I don't want Rush Limbaugh to recommend that I kill myself, which is what he did to Andy Revkin of The New York Times. Now we're off really the science of it and we've veered into policy. And, you know, we fight this fight so much and quite frankly, you know, I'm kind of tired.
Rennie: Well, it's sort of understandable. I mean, I think it's depressing to see that we're still, you know, that not withstanding the amount of scientific evidence, very strong scientific evidence that has continued to accumulate, that continues to point to this being a serious problem; that there is still this level of political and social, cultural pushback that comes from it. I mean, the sad fact is that at certain level politically, you know, you can make the argument that the people trying to make the case for anthropogenic global warming happening, you know, we're losing out at that level. I mean, I think the latest polls suggest that [the] American public seems less concerned about global warming now than it did a couple of years ago. Which tends to mean that unfortunately a lot of the kind of nonsensical arguments that I was targeting here, that they actually have taken root in a lot of the population; basically lot of people have the wool pulled over their eyes. That doesn't mean though that we don't still have a real responsibility to go out there and have to try to educate people about what seems to be the best science at all times.
Steve: The thing that always amazes me about this issue is, even if there is no global warming, why wouldn't you want to develop all these alternative energy sources so that you're not—this is the Thomas Friedman argument, not sending your treasure to [petro-]dictators and you're inventing and developing a robust new technology and the businesses associated with it here in the United States.
Rennie: Right. Well, and I think that is a good argument. I think the rebuttal that would be raised to it by a lot of these people on the other side of this is that, "Well that sounds well and good, but given that there are considerable costs associated with trying to push that kind of development aggressively now," they would make the argument that you know, "maybe it's just not worth it to spend that much. Over time, we will get there anyway, why spend additional billions, trillions of dollars maybe, to that end." Now this is where the question of, you know, are the costs that they're raising inflated? There are certainly, you know, plenty of arguments that a lot of these kinds of transitions will actually help to create jobs or will help to pay for themselves in a lot of different ways too. But again that's sort of academic. Unfortunately, the timeline of like what looks like is happening with global warming is, you have to grapple with this problem right now. You have to start to address it yesterday to start to try to head off some of the most serious repercussions. You know and again listen, it's perfectly reasonable for the world to take the position that we're just not going to do anything about global warming; we're just going to keep on doing what we're doing because it's lucrative and, you know, we will mop up the damage later on. And then in certain sectors that sounds great. Except that I'm pretty sure that there are people in the Maldives Islands along the coasts of Bangladesh and various other farmers in parts of the world who are suddenly discovering that according to the projections that suddenly they're not going to be getting the kind of rainfall they used to—you're looking at massive social disruptions. There are people who come out on the losing end of that argument and, you know, I think they are very, very concerned of the idea that too many parts of the rich industrialized world seem inclined to, sort of, let that coast because they don't seem to be the ones who would be paying the biggest part of those prices.
Steve: Flooded coast!
Rennie: Yes.
Steve: Well there you have it. We usually do our quiz feature called TOTALL....... Y BOGUS at the end of the episode; actually, I'm sure some of the climate change deniers who have been hurling angry missives our way would say that this entire program has been TOTALL....... Y BOGUS, but as this episode is already running long and in the interests of publishing it as soon possible, we'll end here. But look for an addition to this episode that will be posted on December 4th, a special TOTALL....... Y BOGUS–only episode to fill all your bogocity needs. So that'll be it for this episode of Science Talk. You can follow us on Twitter as SciAm—S-C-I-A-M—and my personal tweets as Steve Mirsky, and check out www.ScientificAmerican.com for the latest science news and a really lovely slide show of images of the Earth taken from space. For Science Talk, the podcast of Scientific American. I'm Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us.
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57 Comments
Add CommentAGW is an international Hoax to install U.N. control and taxes over everything. It is now in collapse. Copenhaugen will be a bust. Al Gore will go bankrupt and disappear.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf global warming is a hoax aimed at raising taxes you have to ask yourself, why such an elaborate scheme? Governments can already raise taxes and do so routinely. Ive not seen any proposal related to global warming that gives the UN any control over any nation's government.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDeniers are willing to reject the incredibly strong evidence for climate change, but accept any sniff of a conspiracy theory without so much as a second glance.
"AGW is an international Hoax to install U.N. control and taxes over everything. It is now in collapse. Copenhaugen will be a bust. Al Gore will go bankrupt and disappear."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis message brought to you by Exxon-Mobil
"AGW is an international Hoax to install U.N. control and taxes over everything. It is now in collapse. Copenhaugen will be a bust. Al Gore will go bankrupt and disappear."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This message brought to you by Exxon-Mobil"
And that message brought to you by Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins.
Matthewt1969, you are setting such a double standard for skeptics. What do you think has happened all these years? Scientists disproving Global Warming are denied funds, denied media coverage, and denied debate. Nobody will listen to them. Those for global warming won't even LISTEN to what skeptics have to say.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile the AGW theory supporters were claiming that skeptics were not publishing in peer reviewed journals, several of the emails revealed an attitude that only those who support AGW theory are worthy to be considered peers. Hence the pressure to remove editors who dared question the orthodoxy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFact: More than 95% of climatologists agree that global warming exists and that it is human caused.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFact: Either there is a VAST well hidden conspiracy among thousands of scientists all over the world, or global warming exists.
Fact: The extreme emotional tone taken by those denying global warming exists would usually only occur from within a group who feels threatened. The only people directly threatened by these findings are the oil companies. In other words, if you are not an employee or shareholder of an oil company, why is it such a huge concern to you?
How about this Climate change happens. Adapt or die. Climate change has happened in the past it will happen in the future. The only thing we as a species can do is survive. All of the alarm-ism talks about possible worst case scenarios. No mention of possible benefit. We do not even understand the global climate system to make an accurate prediction of weather for more than a week if we are lucky and people think a computer model designed by people getting paid to prove global warming exists can tell us what is going to happen 10 years from now. Get real and get a clue about what is important. People come first.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's too late for damage control for those who support AGW. Confidence has been lost, media that has backed this nonsense for so long are now trying to prop up the sham science. I'd appreciate it if a scientific journal would dig into the bad science being perpetrated by the AGW and expose it. But this magazine has always leaned left, accusing the right of not supporting the truth of science - and now look at this. You fear the truth and will do anything to hide it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRead this article from the NY Times...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=1&ref=science
How does one's being an editor of a magazine make one an authority on the science of climate modelling? I'd much rather have an engineer or physicist explain how a diffuse and scarce gas with almost no mass is able to somehow magically "absorb" enough radiative energy to re-emit later down towards us in an atmosphere that somehow traps heat, and to over-ride the robust qualities of homeostatis that have been in operation in our climatic systems for millions and millions of years. Most editors of magazines I've met always sucked at math, except to read their accountants P&L statements, and even then they were not so good, as most magazines were constantly going under due to bad financial management. Stick to what you know how to do and start editing the magazine better, and by that I mean for objectivity and nice illustrations and find good science writers and fewer propagandists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy..... my........ my.............. Why not let the raw data speak for it's self?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh! We had to destroy it to protect our corrected data. How in the hell do you correct a temperature reading?
Hahahaha, a small group of conspiracy theory skeptics, and some strategic oil company propaganda spend decades trying to deny and misrepresent the science of global warming, and in response some scientists decide (wrongly so) to try and deny them ammunition by hiding data that could be even more easily misrepresented by the deniers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was a stupid move, but a very human one. Scientists work in the real world, and a real people that make as many bad decisions as everyone else. In the face of a problem of massive scope, with such firm resistence from vested interests, I can see how people who are on the correct side of the science could still be worried about how some data could be used by their detractors.
It was clearly the wrong move, and ends up giving the oil companies and conspiracy clan even more ammo, but what is does not do is disprove global warming.
On a side note, all these posts about how the Global warming crew are only doing it to somehow make money or take over the world... what a stupid argument. Clearly the money to be made/protected here is on the other side... Trillions of dollars of fossil fuel revenue at stake, no wonder they fight so hard against the truth. How can any of you who throw out the money argument as a motive to promote the truth of global warming ignore the vast amount of money that motivates the deniers to deny? Sigh... I suppose most of you don't believe in evolution and figure the end of days will hit us before the end of oil does.
Thanks. I have a new name - Climate Change Contrarian.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan any of you brilliant people answer a few questions for me?
1. What is the appropriate temperature for the Earth?
2. Since humans can obviously dramatically change Earth's temperature, can you prescribe a list of activities we could undertake to absolutely restore the Earth to its appropriate temperature?
3. Will these changes be measureable by the great unwashed like me, or will I need to trust you to massage the data?
4. Would you rather live freely on a planet a couple degrees warmer or in servitude on a planet permanently controlled at its appropriate temperature?
Wow Bsud, that is really amazing thinking... It is nice how there is no alternative to absolute anarchy or absolute control!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat a world view to have.
How about the concept that having the temperature remain with the boundaries that allow our environment to keep pretty much as it has been for centuries, as opposed to having it warm above that range to the point where we have massive environmental change with all the havoc that will cause us?
How can you believe we can affect the temperature of a room in a house, but it is impossible for us to affect global temperature... it is just a vastly bigger room, that billions of us have been heating up for decades. And we're only looking to warm it up a few degrees to cause havoc.
Why would efforts to prevent that havoc be a bad thing? Personally I don't care if the warming is natural or man-made... if there is something we can do that might mitigate it, then that is worth pursuing.
If your plan is that you'd rather die (and take many of us along with you) rather than lift a finger to protect the state of the environment that allows billions of us to live, I have to say that plan sucks.
Freedom is very important, but I'm not sure I want to protect your particular freedom to get others killed and cause untold damage to those that live. I somehow doubt that type of freedom is an inalienable right.
Just because you don't personally believe, against the mass of facts to the contrary that pulling the pin out of that grenade will do anything, doesn't give you the right to do it while standing in a crowded room. You can cry all you want about your freedom being taken away because we won't let you pull that pin, but that is one freedom that denies too much to too many others.
I'm sorry for you that the Global Warming issue is not as clear cut as a grenade in a crowded room, because clearly the scope and complexity of it cause you to want to simply discount it, but the fact is, it is just as real, and needs to be faced head on.
AGW is primarily more about politics than science. This is merely the latest in a long line of crisis, in which something must happen now or the world as we know it will end. This in effect has been stated by the President's Chief of Staff ("never let a good crisis go to Waste") It will penalize commerce, limit our liberties and help lead us to the road to serfdom. With no significant impact on the environment. When science is virtually political it looses it's credibility.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am still waiting for someone to explain why the temperature has not risen in 12 yrs, but the CO2 level continues to climb?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am still waiting for NASA's Jim Hanson to explain exactly how he makes the adjustments to US global temperature data before he releases it.
I am still waiting for Hadley Centre at UEA to release the raw data so that I can confirm the validity of their adjustments (Oh wait.. .they threw out the original data, didn't they?).
I am still waiting to understand why most of the scientists on the 'consensus' are not even atmospheric scientists.
I am still waiting for SciAm to realize that they have been hoodwinked with the rest of the mainstream media into believing the AGW crisis is upon us.
I don't know if the scientific community realizes the inportance of this controversy. The emails give fuel to the sceptics and shakes the belief of everyone else. I believe in global warming but this is shaking my belief in science. I want to know the truth, that is why I believe in science. I don't want to talk about the truth in global warming, I want to talk about the truth in science. Has data been manipulated? Has research that didn't agree been discounted out of hand? Have researchers been blacklisted? This is the most serious blow to science in my lifetime and we need to know the truth before we can move on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistharriss,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI guess you couldn't answer the questions so you responded with a diatribe about my worldview. The fact is that there is no correct temperature, we can't control temperature of the earth, we can't make it rain more to cool it down. We can't clear up cloudy days to make it warmer. We can't. If we ever can, then and only then, should people consider surrendering any freedoms to politicians based on computer models using intentionally corrupted data.
"How can you believe we can affect the temperature of a room in a house, but it is impossible for us to affect global temperature... it is just a vastly bigger room, that billions of us have been heating up for decades."
I really got a good chuckle out of the above statement. Where do you find unassailable logic like that? I'd love to stay and chat with you, but it's chilly here so the whole neighborhood is revving up our car engines to see if we can raise the temperature in our vastly big room. I'll report back any success.
Hey Bsudduth, clearly your logic is a bit off here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou think that because what one person or a hundred people do for 10 minutes is a drop in the bucket, then you can discount what billions of people do over decades?
Yes, you walking outside and flicking on your cigarrette lighter is unlikely to trigger global warming. But to then discount that millions of cars and factories and power plants spewing tons and tons of gasses into the atmosphere can have an effect... that just doesn't follow.
Yes the world is big, and yes the ecosystem has been able to shrug off a lot of the damage done to it over the years, but it doesn't follow from that that our continually increasing CO2 emmissions have zero impact.
As far as answering your questions, what answer do you want? they are stupid questions. It isn't about some one person standing up and dictating this is the one and only temperature that is "right" for the Earth.
However it is possible for people to research and find what temperature ranges have worked for us over the last centuries, and notice that we are exceeding the top end of those ranges, and that there are already global adverse effects, and to see that if we continue in that direction, all sorts of nasty things are likely to happen.
So when you ask your loaded questions, as if they mean something, isn't that people avoid answering them because the questions are too brilliant and everyone is scared to answer them, it is just that you pose all the wrong questions.
But if it makes you happy:
1) The "appropriate" temperature for Earth is the range of temperatures that best support our enviroment the way Humanity needs/wants it. For example, hot enough to cause mass starvation and death would be bad. Cold enough to freeeze everyone to death would also be bad.
2) I believe lots of people have set forth activities that would help correct the situation. From controlling/limiting our production of global warming gasses, so all sorts of emergency methods to cool things off if necessary. Clearly prevention is preferred to other more invasive methods, since they could have side effects we cannot yet predict.
3) Changes are clearly measurable to you now, but you want to ignore it or harp on the stupid moves of those British Scientists as an excuse to ignore the huge quantity of data that does point to warming. So data would also be available to you in the future, but I'm sure you'd ignore it then too, so I'm not sure if it is possible to answer this question for you.
4) see my diatribe
John's answers are quite good in terms of the philosophy of the scientific method. I noted his use of terms like "not compelling" for naturalistic causes of global warming. To me the damage the emails do is that the "compelling" quality of AGW evidence may have been misplaced. The science is not settled and the Emperor has little more than his undies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey Materialist, just one question:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes it matter if global warming is caused by nature or man or some combination? If we see it is gonna be pretty catastrophic for us, can't we look at ways to curb it regardless of its origins?
thharris,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you want people to take this stuff seriously, you and the rest of the global warming evangelists to stop with the hyperbole.
1. Showing a polar bear on an ice floe stirs the emotions of those who aren't aware polar bears can swim, but it is clear sophistry to anyone with firing neurons.
2. Most thinking people question anything that charlatans say. Thus, when Al Gore flies in on his private jet to tell me that I need to pee in the dark to help save the planet, I reflexively assume he is lying.
3. When you imply that billions of lives will be lost, I know you are being a demagogue. For argument's sake only, say the temperature does go up 5 degrees. Is that going to happen all at once and have the effect of a series of tidal waves. Of course not. If it happens over 50, 100, 200 years, people will adjust and move inland.
You AGW folks should just declare victory. Say that since you started warning people that the Earth had a fever - I believe that is the turn of phrase that chief scaremonger Al Gore used - people have modified their behavior and global temperatures have been declining. Continue to pat yoursleves on the back about how smart you are and engage in self-aggrandizement without bothering the rest of us.
The gig is up. Global cooling in the 1970s was a scam. Global warming now is a scam. Try something new next time. I've got it. How about the fact that more people are living in the Eastern Hemisphere than the Western Hemisphere. We need to balance out the load. Otherwise, it will cause the earth to wobble in it's orbit and the planet will explode. I'm scared now - where should I send my money for the planet saving research?
Sarah Palin is going to run on this issue and as she is going to win the Republican nomination, so here is what I want her to say: (Note that many other Republicans to include U.S. Senators have been saying much the same thing.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(1) Cllimate has been warming for the last 150 years. Some folks who do not understand that correlation does not prove causation latched on the proposition that carbon dioxide produced by man is the sole and major cause of this warming.
(2) Carried away by what became a "blame man" bandwagon with almost religious fervor, some scientists on the anthropogenic warming payroll gravitated towards two systemic errors: they massaged historical data records to make the old data appear to be colder, which would thus show recent warming, and they found ways to exaggerate recent warming, or, very recently, temperature stasis to look like warming.
(3) George W. Bush was extravagantly criticized in the MSM for trying to "politicize" science at NASA and other government agencies when he tried to restore objectivity from the top down. Bush was too late, these agencies were already highly politicized and even will today resist with all their daggers flashing being corrected on their junk science habits.
(4) Meanwhile us out in the great unwashed public have to decide whether to believe scientists on the payroll of energy companies, or scientists (many on the public payroll) who have hitched their stars to an AGW theory that is quite possibly the great scientific blunder in the last 500 years.
(5) The idea that AGW can morph into "climate change" and thus avoid being exposed as the fraud that it is will not fly. The only credible means by which warming causes cooling is if the ocean thermalhaline currents change significantly, meaning the whole conveyor system changes. That isn't happening but the world is cooling nonetheless.
(6) At some point the public perception that, yeah, their locate climate may be actually cooling is going to become impossible to tamp down. This will be especially true if an extractive ex-governor of a frigid state starts going to all outdoor campaign events not actually in July wearing a parka and she doesn't break a sweat.
(7) Hey, if die-hard AGWers want to make a killing, they should bet their life savings on citrus crops in California and Florida being abundant in the Spring. Short citrus, because it will be a bumper crop. Of course, if the organges freeze out, they will be ruined, but they should put their money where their mouth is.
"can we afford the risk that you're wrong?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is a non-starter! If I make the claim that the moon is about to fall on the earth, you would not advise everyone head for shelters. Why?
The impulse to do something... anything is better than nothing is false. Until we are empirically certain, we may move in the wrong direction. If we are in fact cooling, introducing more cooling (additional atmos. suphate clean-up) might not be recommended at this time.
CO2 is already at it's lower boundary for healthy plant yields. Reducing yields as population reaches 7 billion may not be wise. There are many ways we can do the "wrong thing". Just review the cane toad fiasco to see how badly "Man" can screw up when intervening in nature. GK
Sitting here sick as a dog with the flu listening to your podcast and wondering if you would address the following hypothesis: CO2 is not a causal factor in AGW or any warming because the rise in CO2 concentration lags the rise in temperature by approximately 600 - 1ooo years (depending on the dataset) and that the phenomena can be apparently linked to the warming of the oceans giving rise to higher CO2 levels due to dissolved CO2 leaving the solution. Think an open cold beer on a warm day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, if you had any comment on Gerlich & Tscheuschner's
"Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse E ects
Within The Frame Of Physics" which In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying
physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric green-house efects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned diference of 33-degrees C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified." This appeared in the International Journal of Modern Physics
B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275{364 , DOI No: 10.1142/S021797920904984X.
"I am still waiting for someone to explain why the temperature has not risen in 12 yrs, but the CO2 level continues to climb?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour premise is flawed, temps are rising. From NASA:
"In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880 (left panel of Fig. 1). The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008."
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
"I am still waiting for NASA's Jim Hanson to explain exactly how he makes the adjustments to US global temperature data before he releases it."
Here you go:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/references.html
Have at it.
'"I am still waiting for Hadley Centre at UEA to release the raw data..."
Hadley does not keep the raw data. It processes it. You should thought to go the raw data found at GHCN
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ghcn/ghcngrid.html
Now if you want to that 5% of the data that HadCru does not make public well then you need to pony up the money to those Met services that charge for it. TANTASFL.
"I am still waiting to understand why most of the scientists on the 'consensus' are not even atmospheric scientists."
That would apparently be untrue. In 2009, the results of a peer reviewed survey of scientist was published in the journal Eos. It asked the questions of scientist.
1. Is the Earth warming?
2. If yes, to 1, is humanity responsible.
And here is what they found.
Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009EO030002.shtml
"Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered “risen” to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2. In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two
primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate sci-
ence as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer- reviewed papers on the
subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% 76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1
and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2."
Rennie's attempt to tar climate-change skeptics with allusions to Creationism is just pathetic ad hominem. If there is logic and evidence to back up this position he does not enlighten us here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is much to criticize about this interview, but one thing really stands out. Where the opportunity for a _controlled test_ of the AGW hypothesis exists---i.e., check changes in climate on other planets---Rennie uses weasel words to dismiss the data available today for testing. It is clear that these data are not comforting to Rennie and so he rejects their utility. Shameful.
And I suspect that he's about to be burned worse than he can imagine. Interested readers are encouraged to read through the emails posted at the link below. They are more damning than even I thought possible.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/
Just for fun I did a Google search on "Global Cooling" and sure enough there were numerous items about the climate actually cooling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid not read all the 4.3 million of them.
Round and round we go (again)
The last time I supported a Government promoted world destroying thing was a couple of decades ago when the destruction of the Ozone Layer was going to give us so much UV radiation we were going to get lots of cancer.
That fizzled out a few years after I changed to using CNG in my (small ) car.
I am not so eager to believe politicians these days.
To all of the AGW "deniers" posting here - - please, please, keep smoking, it's good for you! The whole "smoking is bad for your health" is just an elaborate hoax. The hoax was devised by democrats so that higher taxes could be imposed on tobacco companies - right? Those liberal scientists (all of whom come from liberal universities) know nothing - they can't prove smoking is bad for your health, after all, republicans and republican members of congress (and democrats financed by 'big tobacco') have fought tobacco legislation for decades, they know smoking is safe because they have data from 'scientists' funded by Phillip Morris, saying so. One legislator even had a grandfather who smoked his whole life and died at age 96 - proof that smoking doesn't affect health.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, even now, republican house minority leader John Boehner claims that it is "comical" that CO2 can be harmful to humans - he has proof - he breaths. Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck agree - and so do all of their loyal 'teabaggers' (yes, the same white, morbidly obese, high school educated (at best), racist joe-six pack teabaggers, who btw are also ferociously fighting healthcare reform - you betcha! wink, wink). Of course, how could carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide possibly be harmful when they're naturally occurring (from the earth)? Those scientists and the medical community are just out to regulate free markets, they're anti-American socialists! So go ahead - you show 'em - - keep smoking (!) - - and tell your kids that they can't have that grease-saturated triple-decker burger, super-sized fries, and mega-gulp soda (while glued to their PS3) until they smoke a pack of cigarettes!
Not only is AGW a hoax, but the whole "air pollution" thing is a hoax too - just who do those State governments think they are... (?) using my taxpayer money to fund electronic signs along metropolitan highways that flash warnings in hot weather for children and the elderly to "stay in" due to increased health risks! Bah Humbug to all of those lying scientists all over the world, who claim smoking is bad for your health, air pollution is bad and a serious problem, and that global warming is exacerbated by greedy, narrow-minded humans! Bah Humbug to the Ivy League University Professors, all of whom teach these hoaxes, and falsify their research data - - it's disgusting that they don't have the intelligence and integrity that Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Army, Sean Hannity, and James Inhofe have....
To all of the AGW "deniers" posting here - - please, please, keep smoking, it's good for you! The whole "smoking is bad for your health" claim is just an elaborate hoax. The hoax was devised by democrats so that higher taxes could be imposed on tobacco companies - right? Those liberal scientists (all of whom come from liberal universities) know nothing - they can't prove smoking is bad for your health, after all, republicans and republican members of congress (and democrats financed by 'big tobacco') have fought tobacco legislation for decades, they know smoking is safe because they have data from 'scientists' funded by Phillip Morris, saying so. One legislator even had a grandfather who smoked his whole life and died at age 96 - proof that smoking doesn't affect health.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, even now, republican house minority leader John Boehner claims it's "comical" that CO2 can be harmful to humans - he has proof - he breaths. Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck agree - and so do all of their loyal 'teabaggers' (yes, the same white, morbidly obese, high school educated (at best), racist joe-six pack teabaggers, who btw are also ferociously fighting healthcare reform - you betcha! wink, wink). Of course, how could carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide possibly be harmful when they're naturally occurring (from the earth)? Those scientists and the medical community are just out to regulate free markets, they're anti-American socialists! So go ahead - you show 'em - - keep smoking (!) - - and tell your kids that they can't have that grease-saturated triple-decker burger, super-sized fries, and mega-gulp soda (while glued to their PS3) until they smoke a pack of cigarettes!
Not only is AGW a hoax, but the whole "air pollution" thing is a hoax too - just who do those State governments think they are (?)... using my taxpayer money to fund electronic signs (placed along metropolitan highways) that flash warnings in hot weather for children and the elderly to "stay in" due to increased health risks! Bah Humbug to all of those lying scientists all of over the world, who claim smoking is bad for your health, air pollution is bad (and a very serious problem), and that global warming is exacerbated by greedy, narrow-minded humans! Bah Humbug to the Ivy League University Professors, all of whom teach these hoaxes, and falsify their research data - - it's disgusting that they don't have the supreme intelligence and unquestionable integrity that Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe et. al. exhibit each day. Oh, and the earth is flat, it's 2000 years old, it's the center of the universe, and 'evolution' doesn't exist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krjVoZGH5fw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAaDVOd2sRQ
WHERE IS THE ACCOUNTABILITY?
I have just listened to your podcast regarding "climate contrarian nonsense". Since I agreed with your writing about creationists nonsense, I assumed you were smart on that issue, and would be on others. With science, isn't the person an expert on his own area and not a general expert on all questions? Please let me explain the doubt about climate change being caused by CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease let me state that I am not in favor of pollution, and wish to know the truth instead of being lied to for the "cause".
When volcanoes spew out hundreds of tons of CO2 (and ash) the weather gets colder, not hotter. Does the ash more than cancel out the CO2? If you look at the history that we have written records of we see decreases in climate. Please check recent eruptions, and a special one in 1816. That was the "year without a summer" (and following couple of years). Also called "eighteen hundred and froze to death".
In the 1970's the "ice age" was coming for the pollution. Now the pollution is causing warming?
When the decade of the 1990's had CO2 it caused the warming. The CO2 has continued (and increased) and the decade of 2000 is in the lower third temperature of the last 150 years. It seems that if the weather agrees with increase it is evidence, if not it is a false interpretation.
The email in the news seem to show a intentional faking of the data to agree with the "human caused warming". along with the "hocked stick graph" (any idiot could see this was faked). In the middle ages they grew standard grapes in England, and Lief Ericson went north of Iceland in a wooden rowboat. We cannot take that route in a steel destroyer now.
Al Gore did a movie showing the Black sea in the future dried up from global warming. This was really caused by the Soviets diverting the water for irrigation. Wouldn't a warmer planet have MORE rainfall. The higher temperature would cause more evaporation, and rainfall. The same movie showed polar bears swimming and threatened with extinction due to ice melt. Wouldn't they have died out during the warmer middle ages? If they lived through the warmer periods in known history wouldn't they live through a warmer age now? Al Gore also keeps saying something about trees absorbing CO2. Yes the absorb it when they are growing, and release it when they are burned or rot. That is the natural cycle that has gone on since forever.
In your podcast you explained the middle ages that we don't know if it was localized in Europe, and may have been effected by solar activity. Wouldn't solar activity cover the whole planet, and solar system. If earth and mars are warming it may be coincidence, but that doesn't seem the most likely explanation. Or why it stopped this decade in sync.
I'm not a climate scientist, in fact I am a blacksmith and welder. If I can figure out these questions it seems that someone that is educated in THIS BRANCH of science should figure out the answers.
Also, since about a third of the population think Rush Limbaugh is such a authority I wouldn't make jest of him if I was trying to sway his listeners.
We nuts out here are not against new technology with less pollution, but we don't want massive taxes to support something that may be a farce. Cap and trade seems like a way of giving U.S. money to third world countries to do nothing.
Lastly they keep saying a consensus of scientists. Is this scientist in this field or any scientist? This isn't the way you would have you teeth fixed. You would go to a specific specialist.
Like I first said I agreed with your anti creationist ideas. My answer to the "non evolution" is show me the wild poodle or bulldog population.
Thanks for your time.
Richard Roberts
I have just listened to your podcast regarding "climate contrarian nonsense". Since I agreed with your writing about creationists nonsense, I assumed you were smart on that issue, and would be on others. With science, isn't the person an expert on his own area and not a general expert on all questions? Please let me explain the doubt about climate change being caused by CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease let me state that I am not in favor of pollution, and wish to know the truth instead of being lied to for the "cause".
When volcanoes spew out hundreds of tons of CO2 (and ash) the weather gets colder, not hotter. Does the ash more than cancel out the CO2? If you look at the history that we have written records of we see decreases in climate. Please check recent eruptions, and a special one in 1816. That was the "year without a summer" (and following couple of years). Also called "eighteen hundred and froze to death".
In the 1970's the "ice age" was coming for the pollution. Now the pollution is causing warming?
When the decade of the 1990's had CO2 it caused the warming. The CO2 has continued (and increased) and the decade of 2000 is in the lower third temperature of the last 150 years. It seems that if the weather agrees with increase it is evidence, if not it is a false interpretation.
The email in the news seem to show a intentional faking of the data to agree with the "human caused warming". along with the "hocked stick graph" (any idiot could see this was faked). In the middle ages they grew standard grapes in England, and Lief Ericson went north of Iceland in a wooden rowboat. We cannot take that route in a steel destroyer now.
Al Gore did a movie showing the Black sea in the future dried up from global warming. This was really caused by the Soviets diverting the water for irrigation. Wouldn't a warmer planet have MORE rainfall. The higher temperature would cause more evaporation, and rainfall. The same movie showed polar bears swimming and threatened with extinction due to ice melt. Wouldn't they have died out during the warmer middle ages? If they lived through the warmer periods in known history wouldn't they live through a warmer age now? Al Gore also keeps saying something about trees absorbing CO2. Yes the absorb it when they are growing, and release it when they are burned or rot. That is the natural cycle that has gone on since forever.
In your podcast you explained the middle ages that we don't know if it was localized in Europe, and may have been effected by solar activity. Wouldn't solar activity cover the whole planet, and solar system. If earth and mars are warming it may be coincidence, but that doesn't seem the most likely explanation. Or why it stopped this decade in sync.
I'm not a climate scientist, in fact I am a blacksmith and welder. If I can figure out these questions it seems that someone that is educated in THIS BRANCH of science should figure out the answers.
Also, since about a third of the population think Rush Limbaugh is such a authority I wouldn't make jest of him if I was trying to sway his listeners.
We nuts out here are not against new technology with less pollution, but we don't want massive taxes to support something that may be a farce. Cap and trade seems like a way of giving U.S. money to third world countries to do nothing.
Lastly they keep saying a consensus of scientists. Is this scientist in this field or any scientist? This isn't the way you would have you teeth fixed. You would go to a specific specialist.
Like I first said I agreed with your anti creationist ideas. My answer to the "non evolution" is show me the wild poodle or bulldog population.
Thanks for your time.
Richard Roberts
The timing of all this is very interesting. Why such a furor just before the Copenhagen gathering? I think we know why.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow is it that CO2 is causing global warming if manmade, but volcanoes produce COOLING with the same gas? ALSO what degree does it take to be a climatologist?, since there is no course listed anywhere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVolcanoes produce cooling via sunlight blocking ash and aerosols, not CO2. Even the largest volcanoes produce minuscule amounts of CO2 compared with human activities, not nearly enough to balance the effect of ash and aerosols. In the 1970's it was the popular media, not the scientific community, that was promoting the idea of global cooling and an ice age. In fact, one of the main papers that started that whole thing specifically stated that if the pattern of glacial-interglacial periods continues we should be entering another ice age EXCEPT that man-made CO2 emissions are countering it. The reason temperatures were lower at the time was because of soot and aerosols blocking out sunlight, at a time when CO2 levels were not high enough to fully counter that effect. The 10 hottest years on record have been in the last 20, so temperatures have continued to rise. A warmer planet does mean more evaporation, but it also changes wind patterns and where that water comes down. Recent research has shown that the Southwestern US has been getting drier in the last 60 years, with roughly 60% of that being human-induced. This region has had megadroughts in the past, times when there was little rain for decades on end. Research conducted by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology shows that between 1950 and1999 monsoons had become significantly heavier, while overall rainfall remained the same. Should this continue they will face threats of floods during one season and droughts during others. As far as testing it, CO2 has been a known trapper of infrared radiation for 150 years due to its molecular structure, so it makes sense that raising CO2 levels would raise temperatures. Correlation does not mean causation, but here we have a physical causative mechanism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's interesting. Where did you get your figures? Also what area of science is climatoloigists trained in? I can't seem to find any degrees from any university listing it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems you don't take comments that don't agree. I will take that as an admission of guilt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo fixisisfun, good answer on most, but the idea of flood and drought would not be explained by the same cause. The last 10 years in U.S. have been in the cooler range, although nothing like the 1880's with disasterous cold periods. The news articles usually get things wrong to sell news stories. An example is the jelly fish increase, which is caused more by fertilizer runoff, and the fact that we are killing sea turtles that eat jellyfish, not temperature. If jellyfish were caused by temperature they would increase in warmer climates more than near Japan. We must seperate things caused by temperature from other factors instead of claiming everything is global warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the last 150 years, google the weather in the 18880's, and also the comparrison of prices of oats. When the weather was cool they rose in price. In the 19th century horses were our cars, and oats were our gas.
TO RONINSEUSA if you email me directly I get bouncing email when I try to answer directly. If I answer here the answers look crazy without the questions. I would be more than willing to try and correct a problem that is correct and fixable, but don't want to try and use math to correct grammer. Nor do I think that Rush Limbaugh is a scientist, or that other commentors know anything about the roots of the problem based on popularity or ratings.
The thing with flooding and drought is that they won't be in the same place, at least not at the same time. Some regions will get heavier rainfall, and in places where it doesn't get too extreme this may actually be useful, but other places will get less rainfall because of shifting wind patterns, and in places that were already marginal this can push them into drought. Regarding the jellyfish, I know that their numbers have been increasing explosively, but as you said I was under the impression that it was due mainly to our eating all their predators. A few years ago the Sea of Japan suffered a massive jellyfish invasion, it was estimated that there were 20 billion of these 150 kilogram jellyfish all over the place, causing lots of problems. You are right in that some things are not directly affected by temperature, but the climate and ecosystem are complex and dynamic, and enough things are temperature-dependent that virtually everything can be affected somehow. Unfortunately, this same trait means that huge amounts of data need to be collected to fully understand things, and that can be expensive, which is why scientists were hesitant to give out their data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow the so called climate experts are forecasting global warming, and in the 1970s they were forecasting global cooing. Remember that in the 1910s they were forecasting more rain in the mid-western states of the USA. They said that if the sod was overturned and wheat was planted then that would cause more rain to fall. All this, of course, in a desert So more and more farms were planted to feed WW1 soldiers and as more grain came to market the price fell, and as the price fell then more land was plowed. Eventually, the standard climate stayed and all of those plantings died, and then the wind began to blow. The USA lost many millions of tons of topsoil and the sky over Washington, DC, and New York, NY, was black. The land has never recovered. This is not a success story for the climatologists. Some may say that they have new climate models, but I say review the history.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Now the so called climate experts are forecasting global warming, and in the 1970s they were forecasting global cooing."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are simply repeating fossil fuel talking points. The majority of peer reviewed papers in the 70's predicted warming. This particular piece of misinformation has been repeated mindlessly so many times that it has been the subject of a peer reviewed paper:
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus
FTA:
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2008BAMS2370.1&ct=1
"A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests."
rmrblacksmith says:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Also, since about a third of the population think Rush Limbaugh is such a authority I wouldn't make jest of him if I was trying to sway his listeners."
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First off, the druggie big mouth rushbo has on average, 12 to 15 million listeners per week, which is far less than a third of our 305 million people. He nor conspiracy theorist glenn beck are not climatologists or even versed in science, and as a matter of fact, both barely graduated high school.
Why would anyone listen to poorly educated, highly-partisan radio personalities for scientific fact?
The dumbing-down of America has been surely helped by conservative talk radio, and can especially be seen by the 26% of republicans 'thinking' that global warming is a problem, despite the huge amount of PHYSICAL EVIDENCE!
What they have discussed is about the past and not much about the future. In future, what are the steps we gonna do with Antartic Ocean level raising?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismihagi29 says:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"All of the alarm-ism talks about possible worst case scenarios. No mention of possible benefit."
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Actually, most scenarios have been on the conservative side, since most recent predictions paint a much dire picture, and certainly no benefits from a hotter and more hostile planet.
We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. As the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets continue to shrink, sea levels will rise, threatening rice harvests around the globe. It would take only a three-foot rise in sea level to cover half the rice fields in Bangladesh, a country of nearly 160 million people. Such an increase would also inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice crop in Vietnam, the world’s No. 2 rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.
Melting mountain glaciers are even more worrisome. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland recently reported the 18th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers around the world, from the Andes to the Rockies, from the Alps to the mountain ranges of Asia. Of these, the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau threatens to shrink food supplies most sharply. Their annual ice melt sustains the major rivers of India and China—the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow—during the dry season. And this water in turn supplies irrigation systems.
Yao Tandong, one of China’s leading glaciologists, warned last year in the journal Nature that two-thirds of the country’s glaciers could be gone by 2050, and he has said that “the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”
It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world’s leading producer of wheat. India is No. 2. These two countries also dominate the world’s rice harvest. But unlike in the United States (the third-largest wheat producer), where wheat is watered largely by rainfall, most crops in China and India are irrigated. The vanishing of mountain glaciers in Asia therefore represents the biggest threat to the world food supply that we have ever seen.
Americans may be tempted to see melting glaciers on the Tibetan plateau as China’s problem. And they are. But they are also our problem. We live in an era of fully integrated global food markets; a major harvest shortfall in one corner of the world will drive up prices everywhere.
Sea levels and melting glaciers aside, rising temperatures will also have a direct impact on crops around the world. Agriculture as it exists today evolved over an 11,000-year period of remarkable climate stability. The crops we grow were bred to flourish in this climate. But as the weather changes, they will be increasingly out of sync with their environment.
I remember all of the newspaper and magazine articles from the 1970s expounding on global cooling forecasts. Were you even alive then? You are correct that the popular media promoted that, just like Al Gore and the media has done recently. That is what affects political events and taxes. You have not responded to my stated grand mistake of the prior climatologists that resulted in the greatest environmentalist disaster in USA history, resulting in the dust bowl. I don’t think you have any perspective on science, you just think that today’s theories are all that counts. That is the mistake of a non serious person.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn addition, the most obvious problem is the lack of consideration of possible negative side effects including cost/economic, unanticipated physical effects of proposed solutions, and so on. These are the kind of things that an engineer like me needs to consider rather that the perfect solutions of scientists and politicians that would never work. The devil is in the details of course. That was the problem with the prior climatologists who predicted that there would be more rain in the desert of the USA if farmers plowed more land. That resulted in the dust bowl and the heightened the depression. Those climatologists of course were in the employ of the railroads that were selling land to immigrants in the 1910s and the war bureau that needed wheat for WWI soldiers. A thorough consideration today would also see where the money goes not just take things on some kind of promise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I remember all of the newspaper and magazine articles from the 1970s expounding on global cooling forecasts."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour memory of newspaper and periodical article are no substitute for what was actually being said in the SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. You have made an assertion about the consensus of the scientific community. I have provided peer reviewed evidence to the contrary. Your personal recollections of popular recollections are insufficient evidence.
"You have not responded to my stated grand mistake of the prior climatologists that resulted in the greatest environmentalist disaster in USA history, resulting in the dust bowl."
That is because you have made an assertion with out an ounce of supporting evidence. Can you cite primary sources or articles in professional history journals that support this version of history? In the mean time please contemplate these links to primary sources:
http://www.okgenweb.org/~land/
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/toc.html
The pertinent thing is that me and millions of other people are being forced at gunpoint (as with any forced tax program by the ruling powers, our governments) to pay government carbon taxes which are the only solution proposed and which has not been verified to solve the problem. You put a gun at my head and steal my wallet and I will oppose you. The alternative is to propose a solution that appeals to me as sound and valid, and that I will pay for voluntarily. You propose only force and tyranny. Is deadly force the only scientific solution that you propose? That certainly does not sound like a ethical solution.You cite scientific studies, gosh NYS is still rising geographically from the depression of thousands of feet of ice some 20,000 years ago. We're still in an interglacial period. Don't cite, look. I hear weather reports every day that are wrong when I look outside my window. Climate science is just a statistical analysis that has not been verified by experiment. Why should I believe it to the extent to pay my hard earned money at the point of a bullet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Prof Eng,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The pertinent thing..."
The relevant thing here is that you have decided to bring up irrelevancies and utterly ignore my questions to you about your assertions and provide primary evidence for them. You have failed utterly to address in any significant way and have embarked on a political rant which fails to substantiate your position.
"...that me and millions of other people are being forced at gunpoint (as with any forced tax program by the ruling powers, our governments) to pay government carbon taxes which are the only solution proposed and which has not been verified to solve the problem."
I do not know where you live but I live in a representative republic where every couple of years people get to vote on the leadership of the government. This inevitably means that someone gets to be on the losing side. In other words, elections have real consequences. Do not like it? Tough. See you next election.
While you squeak and squawk about taxes physics is still happening.
"You propose only force and tyranny."
Your hysteria is showing. Might just want to zip it up because frankly I feel embarrassed for you.
"That was the problem with the prior climatologists who predicted that there would be more rain in the desert of the USA if farmers plowed more land. That resulted in the dust bowl and the heightened the depression."
I do not think I am the first person to note that you have utterly failed to provide any primary or professional literature to back up this assertion. Why do you think every one should take your word for it?
"A thorough consideration today would also see where the money goes not just take things on some kind of promise."
You say this while blindly defending the trillion dollar fossil fuel industry. Going to hold a bake sale for little old Exxon-Mobil in the near future?
This has been an interesting discussion in that I am talking solutions via polities and you are talking science. I now see that science has been hijacked by politics. You don’t seem to see this. The residents of Nagasaki must have felt the full force of science augmented by politics when the atomic bomb killed most of them. There is no separation between science and politics and any thought to the contrary is irrelevant. I would suggest that you think long and hard about the political implementation of the solution to climate warming instead of the pure science. Most of us in the real world care about how we are affected.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This has been an interesting discussion in that I am talking solutions via polities and you are talking science. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon't you think that politics where applicable should be informed by science? Reality still happens regardless of your political persuasion.
"The residents of Nagasaki must have felt the full force of science augmented by politics when the atomic bomb killed most of them."
Can we expect you soon to eschew all achievements of science and technology and grow fangs so that you can live without those evil scientist and ENGINEERS?
"There is no separation between science and politics and any thought to the contrary is irrelevant."
Please explain to me how the Law of Conservation is invalid if one is a Democrat or Republican.
"I would suggest that you think long and hard about the political implementation of the solution to climate warming instead of the pure science."
Translation: Do nothing.
"Most of us in the real world care about how we are affected."
Geophysics does not care if you delay and dither it still happens. Do you not realize that whatever political and economic philosophy you subscribe too it will be besmirched for many generations if it is seen as a key component in delaying action? If you want to guarantee that free market economics becomes reviled just keep on this path of delay and procrastination .
"AGW is an international Hoax to install U.N. control and taxes over everything. It is now in collapse. Copenhaugen will be a bust. Al Gore will go bankrupt and disappear."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This message brought to you by Exxon-Mobil"
And that message brought to you by Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins.
And this message has been brought to by... umm, I lost track.
Anyone else notice this?:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Steve: I bring up the idea of population control as a global warming break, but I don't want Rush Limbaugh to recommend that I kill myself, which is what he did to Andy Revkin of The New York Times. Now we're off really the science of it and we've veered into policy. And, you know, we fight this fight so much and quite frankly, you know, I'm kind of tired."
He just slides right over the real problem, which is human overpopulation.
Totally Bogus.
The goal of critical thinking is to arrive at the most reasonable beliefs and take the most reasonable actions. We have evolved, however, not to seek the truth, but to survive and reproduce. Critical thinking is an unnatural act. By nature, we're driven to confirm and defend our current beliefs, even to the point of irrationality. We are prone to reject evidence that conflicts with our beliefs and to attack those who offer such evidence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe items below are in alphabetical order. For someone new to the subject, I suggest the following order of reading:
1) several essays I've written on the difficulty of changing minds: Belief Armor, Evaluating Personal Experience, Why Do People Believe in the Palpably Untrue?, Defending Falsehoods, and Why Woo-woo Wins.
2) the following entries: confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, communal reinforcement, motivated reasoning, backfire effect, memory, and perception deception.
http://www.skepdic.com/essays/anythinggoes.html
aka the science on climate change is sound and has been for decades. People's thinking can go wrong and that's how they can come to un-factual conclusions, that's all. Its only when these beliefs hurt other people and have enormous effects on others (aka all other living things, and future generations that kind of stuff..), is when it gets completely out of line and enormously disgusting. aka w/climate change, water pollution, soil erosion and contamination, dead zones, plastic and waste pollution, and oceans literally being giant plastic and garbage sinks, overpopulation, biotic impoverishment, urban sprawl, agriculture etc. Not counting climate change we're f*ed and it's just funny and the saddest thing ever when people, who think climate change is fake, Also think all of our other environmental issues are just totally solved now, and don't exist in and of themselves.
.......It's just enormously sad, and it's even worse when people won't just acknowledge something, so then we can try to restore it, and prevent it from happening again, so its not an issue anymore. People are just enormously ecologically illiterate that's honestly I think the disconnect it comes down to, the fact that people as much as they like to declare they're know it alls on Google forums, they really don't care to dig deep and investigate jackshi# about these REAL issues. Idk it's also, not an ethical value to care about nature it's considered romantic, ironically-"unrealistic', and it's not highly respected or given merit to in our society. This of course has a huge impact on how people approach and react to such issues, people do not and cannot sustain themselves at odds and against the environment. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard just on a basic 4th grd level, of course we can live with it, and we must for our survival and healthy flourishing as basic lasting communities. Even my 9 yr old niece looked at me once and observed this. people are idk...it's disturbing
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClimate change deniers are contrarians who challenge the evidence that human activities such as deforestation and human behaviors that result in more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are causing changes in our planet's climate that may prove devastating and irreversible. Contrarians pose as skeptics, refusing to accept consensus conclusions in science on the ground that there is still some uncertainty. True skeptics raise specific doubts about specific claims and do not try to debunk a whole area of science by an occasional error or by the general lack of absolute certainty, which is unattainable in any area of science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe core of the consensus view of the scientific community has been stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its "Climate Change 2007" report. The core of the consensus view is, among other things, that global warming is happening and that human activities are contributing significantly to the climate change, which is affecting such things as the intensity of hurricanes and rising sea levels. It would be absurd, of course, to claim that the consensus of the scientific community agrees with everything in the IPCC reports, especially since not all the scientists who worked on those reports agree with each other on every item.
In one important respect, it doesn't matter what the scientific consensus on climate change is, since what matters is what policies the powerful governments of the world institute, and those governments tend to ignore science. If they don't ignore the science, they find contrarians to argue that the consensus isn't absolutely certain* and therefore we're justified in continuing along our current course. Powerful governments tend to listen to scientists when the consensus science is compatible with their policies or when it is required because of catastrophes that have already occurred or are about to occur.
http://www.skepdic.com/climatedeniers.html